Author Comments

The year is 2010 and the Swine Flu continues to thrive within the United States of America. You have been recruited to deal with the situation once and for all. It is up to you how you will save the country before it is destroyed...

Reviews

Rated 5 / 5 stars2009-09-13 14:33:22

Creative and fun, though it could be superlative if not held back by a few flaws in the sense of opportunities to clarify game control and rule set, or to amend game mechanics.

Each pandemic has shown clear improvements from the past one, and I hope you continue making them. This one did address several of the issues of Pandemic II, with respect to zones getting locked down (swine is much better about that), and more transparent game effects (vs a lot of hidden rules and guessing in II, swine is much improved in the actions having more intuitive descriptions).

It did retain a few elements of weakness in the series, in 1) less than transparent mechanics in places, such as it being quite non-obvious one will lose to a tiny handful of people coming in by boat or border from foreign country in an otherwise won game. And 2) game span-of-control, in this installment exhibiting a challenging awkwardness at times of having to turn off things like innoculation in states already fully innoculated, or cancel closed road border's ongoing cost in an awkward click by click hunt for where they were established rounds prior.

On the whole though, nice polish, nice mechanics. 10/5 even with some flaws on arc of improvement and creativity.

If making tweaks to this installment, I would recommend:
1) Adjust loss by time to be a loss only if more than half a percent are infected, as it violates intuition and commonsense to lose at day 40 because a couple dozen people in a nation of millions are infected by a boat arriving, etc. The time rule seems to be in place to avoid games lasting inordinately long when players cannot understand how a few remaining infected keep spawning by boats and borders. Making those effects more noticeable / understandable to the player rather than summarizing the issue by a frustrating loss by time would be preferable.

2) If various mechanics rules/formulas for population growth, boat arrivals, approx. recovery from illness rates, interstate transit, etc, could be shown somewhere, even if as an unlockable achievement perhaps, this would much help comprehensibility and strategy and please the serious/repeat player. It can become quite vexing to be forced to guess and (painstakingly, ack) repeatedly experiment to tease out how something works. One ends up not so much strategizing as performing gameplay archelogy and reverse engineering. (i.e. In II one had to experiment gratuitously with flu attributes because even the basic infectiousness and noticeability stats per attribute were not be listed directly, despite being shown _after_ picking by changed bars, whereas swine one guesses and experiments with what each game effect does when, imho, it could simply be stated.)

3) The summary pages of state could be greatly enhanced by the addition of a listing of their in-effect recurring costs. Much time is spent clicking back and forth and hunting down where undesired effects are still in effect.
3b) By correlary, courtesy features of holding a recurring effect for X days, or auto-stopping innoculaton's recurring cost when the state is fully innoculated would be useability blessings.

Things continuing to arc positively included feature complexity, charming graphics details like the tiny planes, improved choice of rate of time slow/fast points, general balance, selection of win/loss conditions, and gradually more realistic mechanics.

Thanks for all the hard work. Again, 10/5, and I hope you continue to make more. Lengthy summary and a few critique points because it was interesting / fun enough to make me care.

Rated 5 / 5 stars2009-09-02 22:38:23

Rated 5 / 5 stars2009-09-07 20:47:25

Very interesting

This is a great game, it makes you imply a stategy to prevent the flu spreading to more states and to prevent it from killing everyone in the country, you also got to prioritize the states that get vaccines if you get tight on cash. My personal best was 24 days 284.86 alive and 15.66 million dead